Sam Altman offers US government 5% stake in OpenAI — and rivals too

Sam Altman spent the past year pitching Washington on a radical idea: let the US government own a piece of OpenAI. The offer, now formally on the table, gives the White House a 5% equity stake valued at roughly $42.6B based on OpenAI's $852B valuation. More strikingly, Altman proposed the same arrangement for every leading US AI developer — effectively creating a system of public ownership across the frontier. President Trump called the idea "a beautiful thing" that makes Americans "partners in this revolution." The proposal marks a turning point: after a year of watching AI development from a distance, the government is now being invited inside the lab.

Elsewhere this week, Anthropic restored access to Fable 5 with a new safety classifier that blocks bypass techniques in over 99% of cases, and unveiled Sonnet 5 at $2/$10 per million tokens — though a new tokenizer means real costs could be 30% higher. On the security front, researchers at Cato AI Labs disclosed two zero-click, 9.8-severity vulnerabilities in the Cursor IDE (CVE-2026-50548 and CVE-2026-50549) that let attacker-controlled content escape the IDE's sandbox and execute arbitrary code. Apple also pushed an emergency iOS 26.5.2 update with over 25 fixes, citing AI systems that outpace the normal update cycle.